


Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Padmé Amidala, Canon Rewrite, F/M, Padmé Amidala Lives, Padmé Deserved Better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27458230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters/pseuds/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Summary: Padmé opens her eyes on Mustafar.And everything is different.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 7
Kudos: 56





	Like A Phoenix From The Ashes

Padmé drifts through nothing, lost in the silence and emptiness.

Something pokes her.

 _Go away,_ she thinks grumpily. She doesn't want to return to her painfully throbbing body, to a world where her husband is a monster and the democracy she's spent an entire lifetime protecting has been handed away by its people. She wants to rest.

Something pokes her again, and again, until she finally sits up with a groan. "R2...?" Her voice comes out as a painful rasp, made worse by the bite of Mustafar's smoky air.

Her voice. Her throat. Oh, God, her _baby_. Padmé grabs for her swollen stomach, revealed to feel a tiny flutter of life. Anakin, that _imbecile..._ his temper tantrum could have taken away what little she had left.

"Mistress Padmé?" C-Threepio calls, peering down at her with concern in his supposedly emotionless photoreceptors. "Are you all right? R2 was very anxious; I apologize for his behavior." The little droid beeps besides him, making a noise that sounds suspiciously like _I don't._

"It's all right," she says, lurching to her feet. The ground sways a little beneath her feet, but she stands upright.

"You should go back to the ship, Mistress," says Threepio, and she'd agree, but in the distance she can hear shouting voice and a faint, familiar hum. Padmé has spent enough time around Jedi to recognize the sound of lightsabers in battle.

"It's all right," she repeats, walking towards the noise. Her feet hurt and breathing is an effort, but Padmé Amidala is a warrior at her heart and she does not fall.

She can fix this. She has to. It's almost as much her fault as Anakin's, after all. She should have been harsher on him about the Tuskens, she should have reported his behavior to Obi-Wan. She should have tried to drag his darkness into the open and help him confront it, instead of locking it away to fester the way the Jedi had.

Anakin has done terrible things, but he is also broken like no one she'd ever seen. Padmé doesn't know if she can save him, but she has to try.

She finds them by a river of lava, the bright orange light making their faces demonic. Obi-Wan is standing on the bank, yelling something about having the high ground, whatever that means.

Then Anakin leaps before she speak and Obi-Wan crashes to his knees under a wave of dark power. He barely blocks Anakin's first strike; the second burns the saber out of his fingers and burns a line across his chest before he can stagger upright. He curls in on himself with a howl.

"Ani, stop!" Padmé barks, finding her voice at last. Her words are raspy, but commanding--the voice of a Senator and a Queen.

Anakin jerks to a halt, his eyes flipping to her, and Padmé feels her hope draining away. He is burning, falling, breaking...but he hasn't hit rock bottom yet, and she won't be able to reach him until then, if ever. For now, he's lost to her in the high of battle, in the waves of power that the Jedi taught him to strive for and told him to reject simultaneously.

"It's almost over," he says, his words flat and hard.

"Please," she begs, "Don't hurt him. Shini wouldn't have wanted this for you." She takes a few steps down the bank, calves trembling as she tries not to slip on the ashes.

"Shini's dead because I was _weak_ , and I couldn't stand up to the Order," he growls. "I'm not weak anymore."

"We all fucked up," she admits simply. "You, me, Obi-Wan, the Jedi, the Republic, everyone. But right here, right now, we have a chance to try again. To be _better."_

For a moment, he stares at her, emotions blurring on his face. When he speaks, his voice is sad, but his eyes are made of fire. "I am so very sick of _trying_."

He brings his lightsaber down towards Obi-Wan and Padmé raises her blaster--the one she took from Threepio before she left, the one hidden in a hollowed-out section of his leg--and fires.

The blaster bolt strikes Anakin on the chest and he stumbles backward, face blank with shock. He raises a hand at her and she fires again, sending him toppling towards the lava. He flings out a mechanical hand, trying to catch himself, and then he's screaming as the fire snatches his legs into its great bright mouth.

Padmé screams, too, because that's what you do when someone you love is in pain and you're helpless to save them. And she screams because she's frustrated, because she wasted all her chances = to help him, because this galaxy is a cruel and heartless place.

She staggers and slides her way down the bank towards her, the heat singing her hair. Tears are running from her face, her hands are shaking, her heart is pounding, her world is spinning...but she does not drop the blaster.

"I HATE YOU!" Anakin shrieks, his eyes a hideous yellow. "YOU FUCKING BITCH!"

"I'm sorry," Padmé whispers. "I'm so sorry, Ani. We should have had more time." Time to heal, time for Anakin to recover from slavery and the Jedi's contradictions and his mother and his arm and the war and Ahsoka and Palpatine and his own strangling fears, and that's time they just don't have. Not when innocent lives are at stake.

The bank is shaking slightly beneath her, and Anakin's face is twisted with concentration. If she tries to help, she knows that he will kill her, and Obi-Wan too.

She could walk away, but after everything she loves him too much to see him suffer like this.

So instead she kneels before him, whispering, "I love you."

His only reply is an incomprehensible scream, and Padmé feels her throat starting to close up once again.

Before he can finish choking her, she puts her blaster to his forehead and pulls the trigger.

Anakin's head snaps backward and the light vanishes from his eyes as he finishes his slide into the lava. Padme can feel her husband die, and it feels like her heart being ripped out of her chest. She throws back her head and lets out a shriek that could split the sky in half.

Obi-Wan staggers to his feet with a groan, holding his side. "Padmé," he says, his jaw working as he realizes that saying "Okay" or "It will all right," is worse than meaningless. Instead, he simply holds out his hand.

They help each other back up the slope, staggering and gasping. Padme's child feels like a burning weight in her stomach, wriggling worse than ever before. She imagines a tiny hand waving _Bye bye, Daddy_ and bites backs a spurt of hysterical laughter.

C-Threepio and R2D2 are waiting for them at the ship, just as they were told. When Obi-Wan quietly tells them what happened, R2D2 lets out a mechanical groan of pain, and C-Threepio reveals that his linguistic capabilities allow him to sob just as effectively as any human.

Later on, Padmé gives birth and pretends that Anakin is right by her side the whole time, glaring at any droids who would dare to send him out.

 _You're doing fine,_ she imagines him saying. _It can't be worse than fighting Gungans and arena monsters, can it?_

It turns that she was carrying twins the whole time, and for a while afterwards she just sits and quietly cries over them. Leia's dark, fierce eyes remind her so much of Anakin it hurts, while Luke has a little bit of Shini in his soft gaze.

She holds the babies in her lap while discussing their future with the last of the Jedi.

"No," she says, as Luke digs his chubby fingers into her sleeve.

Yoda raises an eyebrow. "The wisest course of action, this is."

"It is not," Padmé replies. "Tatooine is an utter shithole that the Republic did a terrible job of managing at its height, and it's going to be worse now. Neither of my children are going there. Not are they going to be separated from each other, or from me. They will be raised in hiding if necessary, but they will be trained in the ways of the Jedi, and in the ways of thinking for themselves."

Yoda looks rather put off at all this, but Padmé sees Obi-Wan smirking slightly at the corner of her eye. "Also, we need to find Ahsoka Tano."

"No longer a Jedi, she is." Yoda points out, pouting a little.

"Yes, she is," Padmé says simply. She glances at Obi-Wan. "You were close, right? Where do you think she might go if she needed to go to the ground?"

Obi-Wan looks at her, his face brightening just a little bit. "I might have a few ideas."

"Good." Padmé adjusts her grip on Leia. "Now, let's talk about how we're going to wipe Palpatine from the face of the cosmos."

The years pass. They are painful, terrifying, sometimes dark...but Padmé stays strong. She builds a rebellion to battle an empire that has been deprived of its strongest enforcer. She, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan--even Yoda--work together to show her children how to live better lives than they had (they also start working out the mechanics of deflecting Force lightning).

Padmé tells Luke and Leia about their father; a great warrior who got lost his way and ultimately his life because no one showed him how to properly manage his feelings. She teaches them that sadness shouldn't be hidden and that anger, if carefully managed, can keep you burning when nothing else does.

When her children disappear on a mission and return in a battered spaceship carrying a Wookie and space pilot, Padmé can instantly see that her daughter is in love. Personally, she thinks Han Solo is an overdramatic adrenaline junkie, but so was Anakin and besides, he has a good heart. So she agrees to lets Leia keep him around.

After Luke takes down the Death Star, Padmé is the first one to hug him when she gets back. She tells him that his father would have been proud, but she also tells him to be proud of himself, because an accomplishment like that stands on its own.

In the end, it comes down to another battle: Luke and Leia against Palpatine and his remaining Jedi Hunters. Luke loses a hand in the process, and both her children sustain lightning scars. Still, in the end Leia cuts off Palpatine's head, escaping the second Death Star with the emperor's corpse and her brother before it explodes.

Liberty died to thunderous applause, but it is resurrected with the cheers of Padmé's rebels as an Empire falls.

As she watches Palpatine's body burn with her family, Padmé dreams of the future, and to her it feels bright. A future where the Republic will slowly rebuild itself in a better shape, a future where her grandson will one day stumble upon Palpatine's granddaughter on a desert planet and help her become one of the new Order's greatest warriors. A future that will be different, but in a good way, one that she wishes Anakin could see.

 _I love you_ , she whispers into the darkness.

From a great distance, she thinks she might hear Anakin reply, _I know._


End file.
